Compellent announced that two of its financial services customers, Ares Management and Credit Union of Colorado, have reduced the physical and carbon footprint of their data centers, lowering the overall cost of ownership of their technology infrastructure. The efficient Compellent SAN has enabled both companies to measurably decrease hardware expenditures and the associated energy consumption.

“Like so many others, organizations in the financial services industry are facing explosive data growth, further compounded by federal regulations, and client demand for quick and secure access to financial data,” explained Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, Compellent. “Companies like Ares Management and Credit Union of Colorado are using storage innovation to more-effectively virtualize the data center and reduce energy costs to better manage their businesses and compete with much larger enterprises.”

Ares Management Reduces Hardware, Saves up to $70,000 in Storage Costs
Los Angeles-based Ares Management, a global investment firm specializing in private equity and leveraged finance markets, currently manages approximately $16 billion in assets. To meet government regulations, employees need secure transactions as well as fast access to data housed at offices around the world. Ares implemented the Compellent SAN to build the foundation for its virtualization efforts, resulting in reduced storage and server requirements and a rapid-responding, secure gateway to company and client data.

“In our industry, time is literally money, and critical data needs to be accessible at all times.” said Ping Ooi, associate vice president of technology, Ares Management. “The Compellent SAN is a core component of our virtualization strategy and let’s us keep only the most frequently accessed data on high-performance storage, so we can buy more low-energy, high-capacity drives for data we don't. As a result, we’ve lowered storage costs by roughly $70,000, eliminated 10 servers, and reduced energy consumption by 25 percent.”

Credit Union of Colorado Reclaims Disk Space on Way to Greener Data Center
Credit Union of Colorado, run by a board of its members in Denver, Colo., is dedicated to providing green banking services by incorporating innovative and ecologically responsible technology. After reviewing its legacy data center performance and footprint, Credit Union of Colorado needed to implement a new storage infrastructure to improve business continuity and provide redundant data protection, while reducing environmental impacts. The organization chose Compellent not only for its extensive support for server and storage virtualization, but also because the solution would support the company-wide green initiative.

“Wasted storage capacity drew a lot of energy and threatened our efforts to go green,” said Tom Gonzales, senior network administrator, Credit Union of Colorado. “Compellent’s advanced storage virtualization eliminated allocated but unused storage, helping reduce our physical data center footprint by 50 percent.”

Using Compellent’s storage resource management tool, Enterprise Manager, both firms accurately and quickly track the return on their storage investment, manage remote replication and create storage usage reports for budgeting purposes. In addition, Free Space Recovery, available with Enterprise Manager, enables deleted file space in a Windows environment to be reused. For example, the Credit Union of Colorado estimates using Free Space Recovery alone has helped it reclaim 10 to 20 percent of previously unused disk space.